The Homeland Recap: Yoga Spying

Nothing in this episode made sense

If you were listening closely last night, you would've heard the click of television sets across the land switching from Showtime where Homeland was playing over to another channel. Today the same thing will happen, although the sound will be the little chime that Apple TV makes when switching from iTunes or Amazon to Netflix. It most likely happened nine minutes in, when Jessica Brody showed up at Carrie Mathison's house to ask her, using dialogue that could've been lifted directly from any daytime soap, for help finding the missing Dana. "She stole my car and broke her boyfriend out of the clinic where she..." Jessica's voice trails off. "I don't know how much you know, but Dana tried to kill herself. And Leo was in the clinic to avoid homicide charges. Maybe his brother's death was an accident, maybe Leo's a psychopath, I don't know!"

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For those who made it past that, surely their breaking point was then reached eleven minutes later when Carrie risked exposing the triple undercover agent status that the show has devoted this entire season so far to establishing in order to pull a covert maneuver called, no joke, "the Yoga Play." That's also the episode's title, in case further proof is needed that Homeland has lost all perspective and become a parody of itself. The episode's last line is delivered by the world's third most wanted terrorist who Carrie meets after his men break into her home (while Quinn is stationed out front with the sole purpose of keeping an eye out for suspicious activity) and force her, at knifepoint, to strip naked and then put on a discarded Sopranos prop-house tracksuit. They put a bag over her head and drive her to the home of the show's newest elegant villain, Javadi, who is basically identical in manner to all the other elegant villains we've seen, just as his house is styled just like all the other houses, no matter whether they're being occupied by a military wife or a terrorist hive. "You're in good shape," he tells Carrie, right before the credits roll. "It must be all that yoga."

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I once read an article about a woman who had amnesia. She couldn't remember her name or who she was but one day she found her way into an Apple store and was able to enter her e-mail password. When the messages came up, she stared at them blankly, having no idea who they were for. Her hands held the muscle memory of having typed in the password so many times before. What's happening with Homeland feels like that. It's as though it has the memory of once crafting surprising twists and turns but no longer understands what that means. Which resulted in the strange, sloppy mess that was this episode. Speaking of typing, until this week I thought there could be nothing more boring on a television show than watching someone use a computer. That belief has now been edged out and replaced with a new entry: watching someone sit in a surveillance car.

Last week's episode already tried our patience. We were asked to overlook an awful lot of holes in order to accept that Saul and Carrie had been working together this whole time while also having to put up with Dana and Leo's tedious, interminable nonsense. But for the show to think that it's a good idea to undo the stronger plotline in the service of protecting and prolonging a plotline that we hated is just confounding. If the show was so desperate to have Carrie's cover blown (nine minutes after it was revealed that she was undercover in the first place), any motivationwould have been better than having to rescue Dana from the clutches of the Christian Slater blasphemy that is Leo. Even Brody strapping another bomb to his back and then reconsidering seconds before setting it off would've been preferable.

What's even stranger than the initial decision to interweave Carrie and Dana's stories is that everything that resulted also made no sense. Last week Carrie had no options left. She was a political pariah. Her assets were frozen. The government had even taken her car. And then they put it back, I guess? And her name is no good everywhere except yoga studios? And why exactly did she have to be the one who talked to the FBI agent? So that she could convince him with lines like "If you ran background on the boyfriend, you would know he is bad fking news"? Not even the best-case scenario for the outcome of the yoga play was coherent. Carrie's talk with the FBI guy made him declare Dana missing, which in turn got Dana and Leo's photos on television, because we all know how hard it is to get local news to pick up an alarmist story involving high-profile people. But even then the show couldn't manage a clean, non-infuriating resolution. The dude in the gas station was looking directly at the television screen with Dana's face on it at the exact moment she was trying to dip into her last $34 dollars to buy a 16 oz. bottle in the most suspicious way possible. The cops only managed to bring her home after she decided she was ready, which is what the FBI guy said would happen all along.

In order for Homeland to make up for this week, every episode that follows is going to have to be not just decent or good but incredible. If it manages to do that, it's conceivable that this one could just be cut out, the way some people who definitely aren't me cut off the moldy part of a hunk of cheese and salvage the rest. There's nothing that happened that couldn't be explained in a handful of sentences next week. A Republican hawk is being nominated as director of the C.I.A instead of Saul. Quinn's been clued in on Carrie and Saul's play and has also gone blind. Carrie's cover is possibly blown for reasons that must never be mentioned again. Dana's in her room feeling depressed. Someone sits in a surveillance car. Someone sits in a surveillance car. Someone sits in a surveillance car.